anil,
The Hindu says Obama is anything but conservative.
prasad
On Thu, Jan 22, 2009 at 4:04 PM, Anil M <[email protected]> wrote:
> True, Obama was silent on Gaza. But his energy policy ("each day brings
> further evidence that the ways we use energy strengthen our adversaries and
> threaten our planet……………We will harness the sun and the winds and the soil
> to fuel our cars and run our factories") can have an impact on America's
> foreign policies- especially towards Middle East, in the long run.
>
>
>
> On Tuesday, while listing down the things Obama should do *Rob Reynold's,
> Al Jazeera's senior Washington correspondent, wrote:*
>
> * *
>
> " One of the keys to reviving the US economy could lie in moving forward
> aggressively with wind, solar, renewable and other innovative,
> non-hydrocarbon based forms of energy to power cities, homes factories, and
> vehicles.
>
> It can be done, but not without strong presidential leadership and refusal
> to cut deals with *the corrupt monolithic energy corporations that seem to
> feel entitled to run US foreign and domestic policy*.
>
> The benefits include not only economic renaissance and saving the planet
> from overheating, but also would distance the US from its reliance on Saudi
> Arabia, the Gulf states, Venezuela and other countries with incompatible
> interests.
>
> The unhealthy co-dependent relationship between the US and its oil
> addiction suppliers warps US foreign policy and promotes dangerous
> competition with other major industrialized countries."
>
>
>
> A Guardian article described the inaugural speech as " conservative in
> style but radical in substance".
>
>
>
> Let's wish/hope Obama can do things that is radical in substance though he
> sounds conservative!!!
>
> * *
>
>
> On Thu, Jan 22, 2009 at 1:26 PM, salimtk <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>> no day-dream of sincere commitment and action from obama meant by
>> forwarding that article. but, i felt happy watching him on tv at white house
>> on the day of martin luther memorial day with comments around me about his
>> daughters like "mm..still to whiten"..."black, but good looking".
>> we too are eligible for happiness at times without the burden of
>> anticipations.. :)
>> On Thu, Jan 22, 2009 at 10:42 AM, damodar prasad <
>> [email protected]> wrote:
>>
>>> Salim,
>>>
>>> Now let us give B.H. Obama some room to commit some "errors", I mean,
>>> human fallibilities. The other day I saw a mail fantazising Obama as
>>> a feminist. The day before he was an "orientalist" with his strongly held
>>> belief in Indian superstitions. Another day another "ism" will be cast on
>>> him. Our deep wishes are actually about our own conditions; our own
>>> expectations.
>>>
>>> Obamamania that spreads through the net in non-eurpoean countires is
>>> something similar to the joyous moment when the prisoners know that their
>>> extremely cruel and brutal jailer has been transferred, a more gentle one
>>> has taken charge.
>>>
>>> The change is welcome but the rules remain the same.
>>>
>>> Neverthless, the first step in his hopefully lang career was to close
>>> down Guantanamo. The term is well-begun.
>>>
>>> By the way read this piece by Robert Fisk.
>>>
>>> Robert Fisk: So far, Obama's missed the point on Gaza
>>>
>>> http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/fisk/robert-fisk-so-far-obamas-missed-the-point-on-gaza-1488632.html
>>>
>>> It would have helped if Obama had the courage to talk about what everyone
>>> in the Middle East was talking about. No, it wasn't the US withdrawal from
>>> Iraq. They knew about that. They expected the beginning of the end of
>>> Guantanamo and the probable appointment of George Mitchell as a Middle East
>>> envoy was the least that was expected. Of course, Obama did refer to
>>> "slaughtered innocents", but these were not quite the "slaughtered
>>> innocents" the Arabs had in mind.
>>>
>>> There was the phone call yesterday to Mahmoud Abbas. Maybe Obama thinks
>>> he's the leader of the Palestinians, but as every Arab knows, except perhaps
>>> Mr Abbas, he is the leader of a ghost government, a near-corpse only kept
>>> alive with the blood transfusion of international support and the "full
>>> partnership" Obama has apparently offered him, whatever "full" means. And it
>>> was no surprise to anyone that Obama also made the obligatory call to the
>>> Israelis.
>>>
>>> But for the people of the Middle East, the absence of the word "Gaza" –
>>> indeed, the word "Israel" as well – was the dark shadow over Obama's
>>> inaugural address. Didn't he care? Was he frightened? Did Obama's young
>>> speech-writer not realise that talking about black rights – why a black
>>> man's father might not have been served in a restaurant 60 years ago – would
>>> concentrate Arab minds on the fate of a people who gained the vote only
>>> three years ago but were then punished because they voted for the wrong
>>> people? It wasn't a question of the elephant in the china shop. It was the
>>> sheer amount of corpses heaped up on the floor of the china shop.
>>>
>>> Sure, it's easy to be cynical. Arab rhetoric has something in common with
>>> Obama's clichés: "hard work and honesty, courage and fair play ... loyalty
>>> and patriotism". But however much distance the new President put between
>>> himself and the vicious regime he was replacing, 9/11 still hung like a
>>> cloud over New York. We had to remember "the firefighter's courage to storm
>>> a stairway filled with smoke". Indeed, for Arabs, the "our nation is at war
>>> against a far-reaching network of violence and hatred" was pure Bush; the
>>> one reference to "terror", the old Bush and Israeli fear word, was a
>>> worrying sign that the new White House still hasn't got the message. Hence
>>> we had Obama, apparently talking about Islamist groups such as the Taliban
>>> who were "slaughtering innocents" but who "cannot outlast us". As for those
>>> in the speech who are corrupt and who "silence dissent", presumably intended
>>> to be the Iranian government, most Arabs would associate this habit with
>>> President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt (who also, of course, received a phone call
>>> from Obama yesterday), King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia and a host of other
>>> autocrats and head-choppers who are supposed to be America's friends in the
>>> Middle East.
>>>
>>> Hanan Ashrawi got it right. The changes in the Middle East – justice for
>>> the Palestinians, security for the Palestinians as well as for the Israelis,
>>> an end to the illegal building of settlements for Jews and Jews only on Arab
>>> land, an end to all violence, not just the Arab variety – had to be
>>> "immediate" she said, at once. But if the gentle George Mitchell's
>>> appointment was meant to answer this demand, the inaugural speech, a real
>>> "B-minus" in the Middle East, did not.
>>>
>>> The friendly message to Muslims, "a new way forward, based on mutual
>>> interest and mutual respect", simply did not address the pictures of the
>>> Gaza bloodbath at which the world has been staring in outrage. Yes, the
>>> Arabs and many other Muslim nations, and, of course, most of the world, can
>>> rejoice that the awful Bush has gone. So, too, Guantanamo. But will Bush's
>>> torturers and Rumsfeld's torturers be punished? Or quietly promoted to a job
>>> where they don't have to use water and cloths, and listen to men screaming?
>>>
>>> Sure, give the man a chance. Maybe George Mitchell will talk to Hamas –
>>> he's just the man to try – but what will the old failures such as Denis Ross
>>> have to say, and Rahm Emanuel and, indeed, Robert Gates and Hillary Clinton?
>>> More a sermon than an Obama inaugural, even the Palestinians in Damascus
>>> spotted the absence of those two words: Palestine and Israel. So hot to
>>> touch they were, and on a freezing Washington day, Obama wasn't even wearing
>>> gloves.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> On Thu, Jan 22, 2009 at 12:24 PM, salimtk <[email protected]> wrote:
>>>
>>>> Obamas bring new era of history to the White House
>>>> Barbara Ferguson | Arab News
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> WASHINGTON: For more than two centuries, the United States presidency
>>>> has not been vastly more diverse than leaderships in other countries.
>>>>
>>>> But when Barack Obama became America's 44th president on Tuesday, few
>>>> had time to dwell on the journey America's First Family had made as they
>>>> walked into the White House. It was their family's final step in its
>>>> journey
>>>> from Africa and slavery to a White House built partly by slaves.
>>>>
>>>> Now the Obamas have turned that history upside down, with a Technicolor
>>>> family that looks almost nothing like their overwhelmingly white,
>>>> overwhelmingly Protestant predecessors. *The family that produced Obama
>>>> and his wife, Michelle, is black and white and Asian, Christian, Muslim and
>>>> Jewish. They speak English; Indonesian; French; Cantonese; German; Hebrew;
>>>> African languages, including Swahili, Luo and Igbo; and even a few phrases
>>>> of Gullah, the Creole dialect of the South Carolina low country.* Very
>>>> few are wealthy, and some — like Sarah Obama, the step-grandmother who only
>>>> recently got electricity in her metal-roofed shack in Kenya — are quite
>>>> poor.
>>>>
>>>> Obama story is hugely different from the second President Bush, who grew
>>>> up with wealth and privilege. Aside from Obama's top-quality education,
>>>> America's new president came to politics with none of his predecessor's
>>>> advantages: No famous last name, no deep-pocketed parents to finance early
>>>> forays into politics and, in fact, not much of a father at all. Obama built
>>>> his political career from scratch, with best-selling books and long-shot
>>>> runs for office. He and his wife Michelle were only financially able to pay
>>>> off all their college debts a few years ago. But how far they have come.
>>>> Only five generations ago, the first lady's great-great-grandfather, Jim
>>>> Robinson, was born a slave on Friendfield Plantation in Georgetown, South
>>>> Carolina.
>>>>
>>>> His son, Fraser, ran a lunch truck in Georgetown. In turn, his son, also
>>>> named Fraser, struck out for Chicago in search of something better. Unable
>>>> to find work, he left his wife and children for 14 years. As a result,
>>>> Michelle Obama's father was on welfare as a child and started working on a
>>>> milk truck at 11. After serving in the Army in World War II and finally
>>>> securing a job as a postal clerk, Fraser Robinson Jr. rejoined his family.
>>>> His son — Michelle Obama's father, Fraser Robinson III — wanted to further
>>>> his education but became weighed down with debt and dropped out of college
>>>> after a year. He worked in a city boiler room for the rest of his life, but
>>>> did manage to help send his four younger siblings to college; then his two
>>>> children, Michelle Obama and her brother, to Princeton. For all of the vast
>>>> differences in the Obama and Robinson histories, a few common threads run
>>>> through. Education is one of them. As a young man, Barack Obama's father
>>>> herded goats; then won a scholarship to study in the Kenyan capital. From
>>>> there he graduated from the University of Hawaii, then gained his graduate
>>>> degree in economics at Harvard University.
>>>>
>>>> Obama's father returned to Kenya and saw his son only once more before
>>>> dying in an automobile accident in 1982.
>>>>
>>>> When Barack Obama lived in Indonesia as a child, his mother woke him up
>>>> for at 4 a.m. for English lessons while at the same time, she earned
>>>> herself
>>>> a PhD in Anthropology. (His mother, Ann Dunham, then pursued a career in
>>>> rural development championing women's work and micro credit for the world's
>>>> poor, and as a consultant in Pakistan.)
>>>>
>>>> Meanwhile, in Chicago, Michelle Obama's mother was bringing home math
>>>> and reading workbooks so her children would always be a few lessons ahead
>>>> in
>>>> school. It is these details that add significance to the millions who
>>>> crowded the National Mall in Washington, from hearing President Barack
>>>> Obama's rousing speech promising "a new way forward" to the tiniest little
>>>> details — such as the color of First Lady Michelle Obama's day coat and
>>>> inaugural gown that gave the resounding theme of the inauguration of the
>>>> 44th President of the United States on Tuesday.
>>>> >>>>
>>>>
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